Building the Dam Story

At the end, if there is success, one wonders how. Through this wonder one discovers the story. This blog is dedicated to that discovery.

Saturday, June 12, 2010

Why Society

We are interdependent as all nature is, and the work at the dam replicates this truth a thousand times over. For the men that blasted and mucked the diversion tunnels could not do one without the other. The concrete poured could not have ever been done by one man alone. We need society to build, to do a job, which is not saying anything about the ethics of the job.

Why society is seen at fault for so many blunders may be that when like-minded people come together stuff happens. Stuff that nobody accounts for, stuff that no one really needs but then must deal with. Which explains the need by some to escape society, to be rid of it, to be done all the way from its core.

Men who came to the dam for work did so because there weren't a lot of job opportunities available at the time. They also came because of the shear opportunity to build something of such dimension. Those that came for the second reason often left before the job was done, upon seeing that this society of workers, as interdependent as they were, also were being snowballed into a project that treated men as machines. Or men as a labor force that could be controlled.

Society or societies are indicators to be used to identify patterns, cause and effect, the institutionalization of ideas. Do we buy into them? Do we avoid them all together? What seems to count for more is that we recognize our interdependence upon nature and in fact, to really "be alone" is a romantic notion, a fantasy, a fallacy.